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minty3 writes "Scientists say they used the pandemic as a 'natural experiment' to discover how the body's immune system builds resistance to the flu. The research, published in the journal Nature Medicine, showed how certain immune cells helped some avoid the severe illness. 'Our findings suggest that by making the body produce more of this specific type of CD8 T cell, you can protect people against symptomatic illness,' said study leader Professor Ajit Lalvani, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, in a statement. 'This provides the blueprint for developing a universal flu vaccine.'"

If I was a multibillion dollar industry I'd very much appreciate the fact of having a product that gets sold to every human being on the planet, every year right about the time for holidays, scoring me a big boost in the Q4.

But then again I also believe that based on available evidence it was Lee Harvey Oswald that shot Kennedy.

Flu isn't prevalent in Q4 or any specific time of the year at all, especially on a global scale. The reason why people get flu more often in bad weather conditions is because they all crowd inside and the contamination risk is much higher when the people density is up.

Also, it has nothing to do with your "resistance" and vitamin C doesn't help cure the flu. Flu is not a common cold but an entirely different strain of virus. Both are not the least impressed with people eating vitamin C or drinking orange juice. The only thing that vitamin C will help against is a vitamin C deficiency. Whether you will get ill from any of these viruses is mostly determined by how well adapted you already are against that particular virus or something close enough related. You will get infected, you possibly will spread the virus, you just won't get any major symptoms if your body is able to deal with it in an efficient way.

Flu isn't prevalent in Q4 or any specific time of the year at all, especially on a global scale. The reason why people get flu more often in bad weather conditions is because they all crowd inside and the contamination risk is much higher when the people density is up.

"Why" is of no importance as far as profits go, as long as it happens with predictable and noticeable enough intensity during a "when" which is Q4.

If I was a multibillion dollar industry I'd very much appreciate the fact of having a product that gets sold to every human being on the planet, every year right about the time for holidays, scoring me a big boost in the Q4.

One would think so.The reality is that seasonal flu vaccines are not very profitable.At one point, in 2004, the USA was down to just 2 manufacturers.

The only thing keeping the vaccine market afloat is large orders from Federal and State governments.Without those Government orders, the vaccine market in the USA would collapse.

In addition to everything I just mentioned, there's almost no spare capacity in the vaccine industry.So if someone shuts down a plant, those dosages are not going to be replaced by a competitor.

That even with the current vaccine which clearly does not cure the flu, they are able to maintain a government subsidized monopoly with "almost no spare capacity", even though it is supposedly "not very profitable".

On top of that the new, effective, vaccine which would be protected by patents, would replace the old one (while keeping the government subsidies) AND it should clearly be more expensive to produce - both because there's "almost no spare capacity" AND because it is new technology.And that's just

How can otherwise intelligent people be so ignorant of basic economics?

The sad truth is that the vast majority who post on Slashdot still livewith their parents and they have never actually needed to pay attentionto things like a budget or taxes. This and stupidity will explain over 95%of the cases of ignorance with respect to economics.

Sounds to me like their (admittedly higher) taxes have a far higher return in quality of living than ours here in the U.S. We have our tax revenue directed by politicians who are determined to make government look inept, and that's what we get.

I would gladly pay far more in taxes if we had a functional safety net comparable to other first-world nations.

Germany, Denmark and Finland have functional safety nets with relatively high taxes, while at the same time maintaining economies that make that of the U.S. look like a sad joke.
On the other hand, they don't have expensive spy technology used to spy on their own people, or multi-billion dollar fighter planes that don't work. Hell, they can't even afford to run two middle eastern wars without getting trillions of dollars in debt to China!

And don't forget that Canada has rationed medical treatments.There is still a HUGE flow of Canadians down to the States (And even to Mexico) for treatments on their on dime for which they would have to wait years in Canada.

Canada's health care system only works because its close to the US. That will soon stop in Obamacare.

That's a rumour that's unsubstantiated by the facts. The famous "Phantoms in the Snow" study indicates that the large majority of Canadians getting US healthcare are getting it because they were in the US for business or vacation. Many of the rest are doing it for reasons of privacy. And there is a flow in the opposite direction for the same reasons (vacations, business, privacy, and your quicker/closer access claim which actually goes both ways). Also it's fairly well-known that people from the US cros

Yeah, that was me too. But then on year 11 I got the flu & couldn't get out of bed for a damn week. I prefer my sick days to be a little less sick so now I get the shot. I'll let you know in about 6 more years if the shot works out better for me, but so far no adverse reactions and no flu.

I get it often (every few years at least - with 4 kids in the household exposure is inevitable) but never that bad. I've heard people say they are so sick they "can't get out of bed", and i've never figured out whether that's a figure of speech or literal, but i've never been that sick.

Right now i'm probably the sickest i've been in a long time, probably flu, or a really bad cold. So bring on the vaccine:)

It is a figure of speech. Or at least hyperbole. If a person really is so sick that they physically cannot get out of bed, an ambulance should be called immediatly and they should be taken to the emergency room. They need real medical attention.

Meh, I have been afflicted by the flu significantly enough that I "couldn't get out of bed" for a week. The amount of time I spent not in a supine position could be considered rounding error (bathroom, walking slowly from couch to bed or vice versa, etc).

The term is a reasonable first-pass approximation, especially when speaking with others. Yes, you may be correct that most people this sick can, indeed, arise from bed; however, they cannot in any practical sense do so.

And your description indicates that for you, it is a figure of speech. There is no problem with that, but that is what it is.

Well, I suppose we could get into a pedantic argument. Personally, I think you are being excessively literal. I would rebut by pointing out that by your definition someone would have to be in a dead, in a coma, or paralyzed to be unable to get out of bed by rolling/sliding out of the bed. They might be unable to rise from the floor after sliding out, but they could still theoretically get out of bed (ergo, not too sick to get out).

I think most people would have a literal definition of "too sick to get out o

I fall in two higher risk categories (over 50 and diabetic), and so have gotten the shots seven years in a row now. I've had no problems, and in fact I got one 2 days ago and had no local reaction, not even redness, and can't even find the spot where I was stuck. Unfortunately, for me flu symptoms are usually not all that much different than the ones they tell me are normal for colds, so I can't swear that I actually avoided any particular strains of flu, but I have had a pretty good run of not getting si

“The immune system produces these CD8 T cells in response to the usual seasonal flu,” Lalvani said. “Unlike antibodies, they target the core of the virus, which doesn’t change, even in new pandemic strains.”

This simple argument does not entirely convince me that they found a universal vaccine. Proving that it is universal should require extensive experiments on many different strains. Can any experts pitch in why they really did find the key to a universal flu vaccine?

From there abstract (I'm not at work so I don't have access to the full text at the moment) they don't claim to have found a universal vaccine.

What is important to know is that many virusses (including influenza) have a core containing the genomic material and a protective envelop. The immune system can make antibodies to both the protective envelop and the proteins of the core. The different strains of influenza (H1N1, H5N1 etc.) are classified based on 2 proteins on the envelop of the virus (wiki link:

Putting aside that I can't see how they ever came to the conclusion that the universe needed a flu vaccination, what's even harder to figure out is what size of dosage will they need to service something that's (last I heard) approximately 56 billion light years wide, and where the hell are they going to inject the needle?

It's not entirely clear from the abstract, so just for some background (of what I assume is behind the paywall) the main problem with severe flu is cytokine storms [jhsph.edu]. Basically, your immune system can get into a positive feedback loop trying to kill the virus and wind up killing most of the body's cells instead. In the Pandemic Flu of 1918, a great number of the dead were the healthiest ones with great immune systems.

So I'm assuming what's going on here is that they've isolated the parts of the immune system that actually kill the flu, and have a plan to prime them for action. That would be super-awesome. The annual flu deaths, just in the US is in the 3000-49000 [cdc.gov] per year range. If you have to use government terms, that's at least a 9/11 every year, and if you have to spend a trillion dollars on something, this would be a much better target.

Yes, its a shame we didn't learn our lesson after the huge pandemics of vaccine resistant polio. Clearly we should let people continue to die of the flu to prevent it from possibly evolving into something harmful. Or maybe if we just kill everyone who gets the flu we can breed flu resistant humans and finally eradicate this deadly disease.

Yes, its a shame we didn't learn our lesson after the huge pandemics of vaccine resistant polio. Clearly we should let people continue to die of the flu to prevent it from possibly evolving into something harmful. Or maybe if we just kill everyone who gets the flu we can breed flu resistant humans and finally eradicate this deadly disease.

You can't really draw a parallel between polio and the flu. The flu has a bunch of non-human hosts that it can jump between. It will happily sit around in the bird/pig/whatever population until it mutates into something that can infect humans again. And birds go everywhere.

You can't really draw a parallel between polio and the flu. The flu has a bunch of non-human hosts that it can jump between. It will happily sit around in the bird/pig/whatever population until it mutates into something that can infect humans again.

It will do that regardless of whether or not humans continue to be a viable host for existing flu viruses.

I think not.... if the vaccine immunizes against a large number of viruses ---- it will create a competitive gap;
in viruses affecting humans, so eventually, a strain of some virus will probably emerge that fits that gap.

I am all for a vaccine that offers some protection/mitigation against all known types of flu.
But I think implying that it's a universal cure-all against all future strains of flu, is more hope than reality.

Journalist makes up a news stating it will lead to a cure for cancer/autism/flu/aging/diabetes/whatever

If you read a bunch of scientific news titles, you could wonder why we are not immortals yet. It would be nice if scientific journalists could stop writing their headlines with the idea that readers are stupids

FYI, Nature has been known to publish absolute crap... stuff that should have never gotten past peer review.

I know nothing about this particular topic, but I want to warn anyone who thinks that "published in Nature" means "reliable". Actually, none of the "latest research" should be considered reliable, but I think that Nature is one of the worst high-profile journals.